Trinity University's Professor Rando's Top 10 Albums of 2014

One of the super cool professors at Trinity University, Dr. Rando of the English department, has published a list of his top ten favorite albums of 2014 complete with descriptions as to why they made the list. Take a look below!

Honorable Mentions (no particular order):

• Soused - Scott Walker & Sunn O)))
• Nothing New - Gill Scott-Heron
• Gamel - OOIOO
• Crystal Palace - Ernst Reijseger
• The Alchemist and Fragmentations, Prayers and Interjections - John Zorn
• Meshes of Voice - Jenny Hval & Susanna
• LP1 - FKA twigs
• The Great Lakes Suites - Wadada Leo Smith
• Overdrive- Shonen Knife
• Pom Pom - Ariel Pink
• Run the Jewels 2 - Run the Jewels
• Divide and Exit - Sleaford Mods
• Thumbscrew - Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek, and Tomas Fujiwara

#10: Electric Brick Wall - Black Bananas

The five best words to describe this album are the five words that comprise Jennifer Herrema’s post-Royal Trux, post-RTX band’s name and its 2014 album title: black bananas, electric, brick wall. That’s because the album is gleefully electric, stubborn as a brick wall (and also “brick walled,” that is, loud), and, like black bananas, an overripe combination of syrupy sweetness and downright scuzzy rottenness.


#9: Imagine Your Self in a Free And Natural World - B L A C K I E 



This time out, abrasive noise rapper B L A C K I E (always all caps with spaces) makes an abrasive jazz noise record. Here B L A C K I E eschews rapping and instead mostly howls over a cacophony of loud layered horns and driving bass, exploring the outer limits of jazz, where, as it turns out, it does not get quieter, but much louder. This is a kaleidoscope of jazz noise, something like what you would get if you crossed Sun Ra with… B L A C K I E.


#8: Lone - Ai Aso 



Ai Aso’s face on the cover of this live album is so light that it almost threatens to fade out of existence. The music is ghostly in just this way: the songs are slow and brittle; they could fall apart after any note, yet they hover on the verge, just like the cover image. Be careful: I think this delicate record aims to haunt you.


#7: Lese Majesty - Shabazz Palaces



Lese Majesty (which means “an offense against the king or state”) doesn’t affront in the way its title might suggest. On “#Cake,” Ishmael Butler repeats, “I’m having my cake and I’m eating cake,” and that’s exactly right: Shabazz Palaces takes an unconventional route—spacey beats, freedom from the verse-chorus-verse tonics—but so consistently and abundantly satisfies its own established conventions that it gets to have its cake and eat it, too.


#6: Perpetual Motion: A Celebration of Moondog - Sylvain Rifflet and Jon Irabagon 



Jazz musicians Sylvain Rifflet and Jon Irabagon chose a children’s chorus for the songs with vocals included on their loving tribute to the singular Moondog. The children’s voices capture the kid-like playfulness of Moondog’s compositions. The musicians stay true to the meticulously fugal quality of Moondog’s minimalist music, which draws as readily from European classical and American jazz traditions as it does from nursery rhymes, simple ditties, and sea chanties, while leaving themselves room for improvisation. They capture the spirit of Moondog’s music perfectly.


#5: Benji - Sun Kil Moon

Benji is an emotion-drenched folk album about love, sex, and—mostly—death (from cancer, working-class accidents, mercy killings, moped accidents, aneurysms, serial murders, school shootings). It is especially about class experience and death, and about Mark Kozelek’s feelings about his home in rural Ohio. So many of the songs reference Kozelek’s travels in order, it seems, to emphasize how far he’s gone from home. Yet deaths in the family have and will keep drawing him back to the place he’s tried to leave. There is one song for each of his parents, one that anticipates and dreads the loss of his mother, and the other, the sunniest song on an otherwise elegiac and melancholy album, records the better and worse, mostly better, of his relationship with his father.

This is the most weirdly literal album I’ve ever heard. I doubt Kozelek uses a single metaphor. Instead, he details and enumerates everything, even to the point of overload, annoyance, and discomfort. The album seems to want to test the listener’s limit for personal revelations and to test his or her willingness to hear the names of aging and death stripped of the consolations of figurative language.

#4: Heartleap - Vashti Bunyan

This is Bunyan’s third album of her 45-year recording career, and apparently she has said it will be her last. Just Another Diamond Day (1970) created an otherworldly English fairyland, full of glowworms, dragonflies, lily ponds, and cottages that Bunyan painted with her breathy voice and nursery-rhyme rhythms. Now, improbably, Bunyan’s voice sounds even better than it did in 1970, but the scenes she sets are more serious, quotidian, poignant, and intimate. Back then it was “just another diamond day,” but now, “Every day is every day / One foot in front of the other / Learn to fall with the grace of it all / As stones skip across the water.” All we can do is fall with grace.

Particularly striking is the track, “Mother,” in which Bunyan sings about being a child and secretly watching her mother dance, “briefly unbound,” when she believed that no one was looking. Sometimes her mother would sing, “Songs long learned / So long untuned.” She wants to tell her mother’s story, but it slips away like smoke or water. On “Shell,” she sings, “In the telling of your story / You say there's so much more / Then you curl away from me / To some deeper sea.” 

Now older than her mother had been then, Bunyan, whose own career has seen such long stretches of songs “untuned,” can reflect on those rare freeing moments when music gives relief from duty and responsibility. Like her mother, however, she realizes how difficult it is to share such moments, which is always somehow to part with them. And this is the main struggle on Heartleap: between the desire to share and to withhold, to communicate with others and to be alone, to tune the song or leave it untuned, to sing or be silent. Bunyan wishes to retire to a “blue shed,” but fears, “I might emerge to a sunny day / With everybody gone away.” 

Here there are no glowworms or lily ponds, but rather memories of small moments, of her mother, and of her conflicting desires and fears. These are the “heartleap” subjects that only come from long experience; they tally the losses one must accumulate through life, which over the decades of her career Bunyan was almost magically able to preserve her voice in preparation for finally singing.

#3: Nothing Important - Richard Dawson

I spent much of 2014 listening to Dawson’s 2013 album,The Glass Trunk, which consists of seven largely a cappella folk songs based on reports of deaths and accidents recorded in the archives of Dawson’s native Newcastle, with noisy and inventive guitar and electric harp improvisations spaced between them. Dawson blows into these largely found stories in the way an avant-garde jazz musician might blow into a saxophone. When he sings the ballad that recalls how the village men put an old horse to a slow and brutal death, the suffering of the horse comes through Dawson’s voice until it threatens to burst the ballad form. Rarely have I heard an album more historically and locally grounded, with so much invention brought to its subject, that also seems to touch a nerve at every painful and lovely turn. Nothing Important is like a pendant to The Glass Trunk, two long songs bookended by two short guitar pieces. It is almost like zooming in on a small portion ofThe Glass Truck and recognizing that its shape is a fractal. In these songs one recognizes the intelligence and experimental energy that Dawson brings to folk music.


#2: Syro - Aphex Twin



Syro is a selection of music Richard D. James has made in the 13 years since his last album, but it might as well be a greatest hits collection. Everything that has made James the most inimitable and virtuosic electronic musician in the world since the 1990s can be found on this album, but in a more integrated, condensed, and controlled form than he has ever achieved before. Somehow Syro encapsulates the vast and brilliant range of ideas that James has developed over the decades and integrates them together on Syro in a masterpiece of synthesis. Yet the maestro is impatient. Ideas that once would have played out in the course of an entire song are breezed through here in two or three measures. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that every minute of this album could be the germ of another album. Syro represents the richness that only comes from long practice and mastery of form. But put all of that aside: this is also music that winks and jokes. Syro is the funniest album of the year.


#1: Ruins - Grouper

For me, the most magical musical moment this year comes during “Labyrinth,” a slow and contemplative piano piece whose variable tempo keeps the listener hanging on each successive note. Like Satie, Harris’s piano pieces are strangely beguiling and often outright beautiful. At the end of the track we hear the incongruous beep of a microwave, as though unexpectedly coming back on after a power outage. It breaks the spell of the night and of the album, catching and exposing us at our most entranced. Wonderfully, when the beep breaks the illusion that we are all alone with Harris and her piano and her room in Aljezur and its surroundings, it also strangely reinforces the feeling of intimacy: it is simultaneously a self-destructing and self-perpetuating illusion. 

Harris uses subtle effects and her arrangements are deceptively complex. Her voice rarely rises above a whisper; the frogs outside, a thunderstorm, and the tape hiss from the portable 4-track are neither background nor competition, but complementary tones and shades. The “ruins” of the album title are ruins of love (“Maybe you were right when you said I’ve never been in love”), but it is also about sweeping the ruins away. The song title, “Clearing,” could describe any track here. 

This is the opposite of headphone music. It is environment music. John Cage insisted that a cough or a baby crying could not ruin a good piece of modern music. Ruins fills any room it enters, yet space for the ambient sounds in your room and outside of your house seem already to be factored into this record. Like the microwave beep that at once pushes the song away and pushes it closer, Harris gives us music that generously lets you live inside of it, even as it slowly settles inside of you.